Private Viewing

Amsterdam had turned properly autumn by the time the call came, the canals carrying the first drifts of leaf-fall along their edges. Jo had begun, without quite noticing when it started, to measure the year less by the case than by the ordinary rhythms that had grown up around it — dinner most Thursdays at the gallery, Sundays still kept for Femke, a set of keys to a canal house that had stopped feeling like anyone’s alone.

The call came on a Tuesday in October, from a conservator in Zurich Jo had never met, speaking careful English to a Dutch detective who then spoke rather less careful Dutch to Anselm, who relayed the whole of it to Jo in the north room with his voice not quite steady.

Girl at the Window had been found, intact, in a private vault registered to a Swiss holding company that had bought it,…